1 Day Since the Wedding – Mr. and Mrs. Ringe! May 27, 2012

So I haven’t posted a blog in FOREVER!!! But I totally wasn’t allowing myself to do anything that didn’t pertain to creating something for the wedding lol. But anyway….we are married! Yesterday was the big day and it was so so so amazing. The weather cooperated. It even cooled down right before the wedding and there was a cool breeze. It was nice and sunny and there was a rainstorm in the morning so everything seemed really lush. Couldn’t have asked for a better day 🙂

So now that the big day is over, I’m going to just start posting random blogs about things from the wedding. So much of the wedding was DIY that I feel like we should share it with the world 🙂 So stay tuned!

I’m so thankful for everyone that came out to celebrate with us!!!!

Mrs. Ringe ❤

Photo by my brother Brian Shaner

Photo by my cousin – Brittany Daugherty

Photo by Me – self portrait ❤

57 Days to Go – Bachelorette Cupcake Crawl March 30, 2012

Well, I haven’t been posting much at all lately, and I have two reasons: 1) I can’t seem to find the time to sit down and work on a blog 2) The things I’ve been doing are things I don’t really want people to see until the wedding 🙂 During the month of March I have found my dress, picked out the tuxedos, found the flower girl dress and maid of honor dress, finished sculpting custom groom’s cake toppers (and started the painting), finished folding 1,000 cranes and hung them in a senbazuru, finished putting together placecard holders, put together bridesmaid gifts, finished 82 wedding favors, found an envelope/keepsake box, finished decorating the guest book, pen holder, flower girl basket and ring bearer pillow, found my garter and made my bouquet. It was a damn busy month!

But anyway, enough about that, back to my bachelorette party! I’m not a big drinker (or even a small drinker), so bar-hopping was out of the question. Because of this, my awesome maid of honor, Carley, put together this Cupcake Crawl! I LOVE sweets, plus I’m a cake decorator, so it was pretty much perfect 🙂 I invited the two other cake decorators from the store to come with us also, and our boss was nice enough to let all three of us have the day off at the same time! (which NEVER happens, but it’s spring break and the store is dead).

So I picked up Katie and we headed to Palatine to meet up with Carley and Hillary. When we got to the train station we had just enough time to grab some Starbucks before jumping on the train. Carley paid for mine, which set the tone for the rest of the day. The girls wouldn’t let me pay for anything!

On the train to Chicago

After a nice train ride, we arrived at Ogilvie Station in Chicago. We had to go down the block to Union Station to get a CTA day-pass so we could hop on and off the bus as many times as needed. I love the look of Ogilvie Station, it’s very modern looking, but Union was very cool also because it’s very old looking!

Ogilvie Station

Visual

Union Station

Once we had our passes in hand, we headed out on our adventure! We went to lots of cupcake and chocolate shops all around the city. The girls took turns buying me delicious treats 🙂

Hershey Store

Ghirardelli Store

Leonidas Chocolate Shop

Hendrichs Belgian Bakery

Teuscher – and Katie being a goof in the window 🙂

Sprinkles Cupcakes

Sarah’s Pastries and Candies

Forever More Cupcakes

Break from the sweets – Picnic lunch in Millennium Park

Sugar Bliss

The Cupcake Counter

Crumbs Bake Shop

So that’s a run down of the sweet shops that we went to 🙂 We also did a lot of sightseeing and window shopping. I also got to take my first ride on a city bus! I don’t want to post 200 photos on here, so I’ll just leave you with one of my favorites. While we were in the 900 building (which has stores like Bloomingdales) we went into Williams and Sonoma. On our way out, Carley nearly bumped into the only celebrity I’ve ever randomly seen ‘on the street’. Kelsey Grammer! What a fun little addition to an amazing day 🙂 I’m so greatful for wonderful friends that made sure I had an amazing day. Thanks so much guys ❤

81 Days to Go – Wedding Rings! March 6, 2012

Another big item was checked off of our to-do list tonight! We headed out to Jared right after Rob got home from work (I somehow really like that place even though they have the most annoying jewelry commercials EVER). I really like that they have their lab right on-site though, which means that if we need work done to our rings it doesn’t have to be sent out anywhere and we get them back very quickly.  I had my engagement ring re-sized last year and got it back the next day, so awesome.

We found Rob’s ring first. He tried on a bunch of different styles in a few different materials that really didn’t fit the bill, but the last one he tried ended up being the winner. It’s titanium, which is pretty neat. I didn’t even know they had titanium wedding bands.

Rob’s titanium silver and black wedding band

I was sort of dreading trying to find a band to go with my engagement ring because of the unique design of my ring. It has an awesome filigree pattern on the sides, and I knew it would be difficult to find something that didn’t cover it up or take away from it. I tried on several that had diamonds on the band, but they just weren’t lining up right. Half the time there was an obvious gap between the wedding band and my ring because of the center of my ring being slightly wider than the band.  But the jeweler came to the rescue! He found me this awesome enhancer ring (that is basically two rings!) that my ring will go in the middle of. It looked so perfect when I tried it on! the band is thin enough that it doesn’t cover up much of the design of my ring, and basically makes a little platform for it. It was so sparkly and awesome 🙂 And WAY cooler than what I thought I would end up getting.

This is my engagement ring, the design on the sides is what I was worried about.

My white gold and diamond enhancer wedding band

We couldn’t be more excited!!!!!!!!!! Can’t wait till we get to put these beautiful rings on each others fingers 🙂

83 Days to Go – Wedding Invitations…Check! March 4, 2012

Last night our bestest buddies Jim and Carley came over to help us finish our wedding invitation project. We had some delicious fajitas for dinner, then put our noses to the grindstone. We closed the last envelopes sometime after midnight, and it feels fantastic to have another huge project checked off of our list. They’ll be in the mail tomorrow!

Of course we have to send one to ourselves as a keepsake 🙂

We are sending 105 invites out! That’s a lot of cutting, folding, gluing and stamping!

All packed up and ready to go to the post office 🙂

After everyone gets their invites I’ll post a photo of how they look. I don’t want to spoil it ahead of time!

100 Days to Go – Really? Yikes! February 16, 2012

What a milestone! It seems like only yesterday that our countdown was over 340 days! I can’t believe that 100 days from now I will be marrying my best friend 🙂 A lot of things have been coming together lately, but there is still SO much to do! I have somewhere around 930 cranes finished, so that project is nearly into the next phase (stringing and hanging), we have around 80 wedding favors completely finished, and Rob has begun making our invitations (and promises they will be ready to be mailed the first week of March). That’s really all I have for tonight, I mostly just wanted to mark the 100 days to go marker 🙂 Bring on the double digits!!!

104 Days to Go – Found Our Officiant! February 12, 2012

We’ve been stressing over finding the actual person to marry us for quite awhile now. For the most part we didn’t even know where to start looking. For awhile we considered having a friend that got ordained online officiate, since we don’t belong to a church, but then we realized how complicated structuring the ceremony can be and figured we might as well go with a pro and save ourselves the stress of trying to figure things out. So I did what I always do, I turned to my old buddy Google :). That’s how we found our venue, so why not our officiant?

As luck would have it, I ran into the site weddingwire.com, which is the same site that I first saw the reviews for the Japanese garden. As soon as I saw Reverend Roy Frye’s smiling face as one of the reverends that the site was spotlighting, I knew he was our guy. Reading the info on his website just clenched the deal. We sent him our info and he gave us a call not long after.

We met with him today for coffee (or hot chocolate and chai tea for us) at Panera Bread in Aurora (he’s from Oswego). He is such a nice man 🙂 We were extremely impressed with how much information he had for us and also how he’s incorporated the internet into what he does. He will be sending us a TON of information through emails. He’ll give us some basic structure for the type of ceremony we want and we can build it the way we want using our own ideas or choosing for ideas that he sends us :). I really can’t express how impressed we were with the information he has ready for us. And although most of our info will be coming through email, he did have a decent amount of stuff set up for us in a folder along with two big wedding magazines. I thought that was such a nice touch 🙂 The Knot magazine even had a little tab bookmarking his ad hehe :).

After sitting and chatting with him for about an hour, we were 100% sure that he was our guy! And we are so excited to see how the script for our wedding ceremony comes together ❤ I can’t wait till May 26th, just 104 more days to go!!

121 Days to Go – Cranes, Cranes, Cranes! January 26, 2012

I am still hard at work on my 1,000 origami cranes project! Right now I have right around 700 🙂 Rob has helped, as well as my friend Kate from work. I’ve been using mainly scrapbook paper from Hobby Lobby, Michael’s and JoAnn Fabrics. However, I did decide to order some actual origami paper through a seller on Etsy. It took a couple of weeks, but my origami paper has arrived from Hong Kong! Check it out 😀

I wish I could read Chinese, I love how the characters look 🙂

6 different patterns of beautiful origami paper

All of the papers have wonderful gold accents for a bit of sparkle

Cranes made from each paper design, so cute!!

Time to get back to work! 🙂

127 Days to Go – Thinking About the Cake January 20, 2012

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been putting actual thought into how our wedding cake is going to look. So far I know how big it is going to be, and of course it’s going to be HUGE! It kinda has to be right? I’m a cake decorator after all 😀 Oh, and I should probably mention that I’ll be making it myself, even though people keep telling me I’m crazy. But seriously, how could I not? Anyway…I’m planning to do a 6″, 8″, 10″, 12″, 14″, 16″, with small columns in between so that I can wait to stack the layers until I’m at the reception. I don’t want to give away too much info about how it’s going to look because I want people to be surprised when they see it. We already have our topper as well, and it’s also quite tall as far as toppers go. This beast should be pretty impressive when it’s all said and done!

In the meantime, I will share a photo of a cake that is decorated with the exact same gumpaste flowers that will be on ours. I ordered them earlier this week and they came in today. They look fantastic in person! I really just want to make the cake right now!

129 Days to Go – Menu Decisions! January 18, 2012

Well today was our wedding menu tasting and I was so looking forward to it! Not only to taste what was sure to be amazing food, but also just to get a chance to go back to the gardens. It’s so beautiful there! I was also looking forward to getting a glimpse of the gardens covered in snow since we might never really get another chance. The gardens are closed to the public from October to April so most people will never get the chance to see them snowy. We couldn’t walk the paths or anything, but we could see quite a bit from the giant windows in the reception area.

Our tasting was scheduled for 11am. We got there about a half hour early which kind of worked out because we had a little time to look out the windows and take photos before they brought the food out.

 

After enjoying the beautiful scenery for a bit, it was time to taste the food we had chosen. We were allowed to taste 3 entrees plus 1 vegetarian meal. Here is what we tried 🙂

Our tasting menu

Grilled Salmon

Five Spice Chicken

Grilled Pork Chop

Grilled Vegetable Rigatoni

Everything we tried was SO delicious! It was kinda hard to narrow down our choices. We already knew we wanted the Prime Rib, but we didn’t get to taste it because they can’t really make just one serving. We were also pretty sure that we wanted the Grilled Vegetable Rigatoni as our vegetarian choice, but tasting it certainly solidified the decision. As amazing as everything was, it might have been my favorite thing (but I am a huge fan of cheese)! So between the 3 other things we tasted we had to pick only 1. I initially wanted the Grilled Pork Chop, but tasting the other items made it much more difficult. In the end we chose the Grilled Salmon. We all really liked everything on the plate. The black bean-sweet potato hash was a surprisingly tasty side dish!

So hopefully everyone enjoys the menu that we have chosen. If you don’t like steak or salmon, the pasta dish really is a surprisingly delicious alternative! There will also be a chicken tenders or macaroni and cheese option for the kiddies, and appetizers will be served during the cocktail hour (we still have to decide on those). We will also be hosting an open bar for an hour before dinner and an hour after (during dinner and later in the evening drinks can still be purchased). So get excited people, this thing is really coming together!!

135 Days to Go – The Wedding Party January 12, 2012

We’ve finally finished deciding another important part of our wedding, who’s going to stand up there with us! It’s been fairly difficult, at least for me, because the vast majority of my friends are anywhere but here. In the end I decided that it would be best to have people that are nearby rather than trying to plan too much long-distance.

So, on Rob’s side we have his brother Phil as the best man, one of his best friends Jim, and my brothers Brian and Christopher. On my side will be one of our best friends Carley as the maid of honor, another of my best friends Cory (who lives in Orlando, but picking out a tux shouldn’t be too difficult without being here…hopefully), and Rob’s two cousins Kapi and Skylar as junior bridesmaids. Another of Rob’s cousins, Lexi, will be the flower girl and my nephew Braedon will be the ring bearer (hopefully, that’s still not set in stone). We’re still trying to figure out a job for two other young boys because we don’t want them to feel left out, but we’re having a heck of a time. Any suggestions on a fun job for boys under 8 would be greatly appreciated!

Carley – Maid of Honor, Jim – Groomsman

Phil – Best Man

Rob – Groom! <3, Christopher – Groomsman, Brian – Groomsman

Cory – Bridesmaid? lol, Mandy – Bride!

Kapitola – Junior Bridesmaid

Skylar – Junior Bridemaid

Lexi – Flower Girl

Braedon – Ring Bearer

I’m really glad that this is one more thing I can cross off my list though. I’ve been going up, down , back and forth on what to do with the wedding party and I’m pretty excited to check it off my list 🙂